Brügger og Bertelsen: Quatraro Mysteriet 2

Ud fra et dokumentar-synspunkt er serien om Quatraro (for sagen som sådan se tidligere indlæg) et tv-program, som viser to journalisters research. Man kunne så være fræk og spørge, hvorfor pokker vi skal se researchen og ikke en velturneret undersøgende krimidokumentar, hvor journalisterne holder sig i baggrunden og ikke i forgrunden. Hensigten med denne genres fortællemåde er imidlertid at Brügger og Bertelsen skal være i forgrunden som to karakterer, vi skal interessere os for, en slags to uheldige helte som gør, hvad de kan for at bryde den tavse mur og gåderne omkring sagen. Arbejdsmåden og det store uoverskuelige EU er det, det drejer sig om. Også.

Spørgsmålet er så, om de er gode nok til at fylde disse roller ud? Om den underfundige skæve humor, som de to praktiserer så godt i studiet derhjemme, også fungerer i diverse hotelværelser og fly. Jeg synes det ikke, jeg keder mig stadig, selvom dette andet afsnit havde en række gode ansigter og typer i de mange kontorer i Bruxelles og i Quatraros fødeby. Men når jeg nu synes at det måske ikke er så interessant at finde ud af hvordan manden døde for 16 år siden, og ikke fanges af de evindelige nærbilleder af de to journalister…  det kan blive bedre i de kommende afsnit, men faren for manér, selvsving og krukkeri er nærliggende.

Set på www.dr.dk

Svt Tonight : The Caviar Connection

OBS! Especially for Danish and Swedish readers

: On this site the great film of Dragan Nikolic has often been mentioned and praised (go to “search” and write the title). Here is another piece of promotion on the occasion of the screening on Swedish public channel svt 1 tonight at 22.00.

The Caviar Connection is a documentary about the Rats brothers – two sturgeon fishermen and their dream to catch the BIG fish which will bring them the money to leave their small village in Serbia. The brothers and those who live around them are like characters from slapstick comedies, they always argue, cheat and calculate, they disagree but yet, always work together. While they gamble with written and unwritten rules of nature and economics, their characters become deeper without them even noticing it. (Transit Film, the distributor)

… A wonderful mixture of observational documentary and creative authorship. It shows the inevitable disappearing world of traditional fishing through the colorful, character driven story of one family. The film pulls us so fully into this world, that we can’t help but have warmth for these flawed characters, find humor in their ordinary situations, and feel compassion for their struggles. (Jury motivation at ZagrebDox where it won first prize).

http://www.filmstransit.com/

Simon El Habre: The One Man Village

Best international feature Documentary at the Hot Docs was announced yesterday night and the winner was the Lebanese filmmaker Simon El Habre with this ”The One Man Village”, well deserved for a charming and well constructed film. Here is the review I wrote when I saw the film at DoxBox in Damascus in March:

It is one of those minimalistic films that subject-wise has been seen so many times: Man lives alone outside the cities, big house, animals – cows, chicken, horses, cats and dogs – he has retired from the noisy world full of pollution and he has a fine life. A bit excentric, yes, but clever and sweet to the filmmaker, his nephew, the Lebanese film director Simon El Habre, who masters a narrative full of warmth and surprises with the behind the camera nephew getting closer and closer to his uncle and his story. And why are you not married, have you ever been in love, what happened to your parents… questions are asked, the uncle demonstrates his passion for the animals, gets into his old, rusty car to go downhill with the milk, and slowly we understand that the village is emptied because of what happened in the civil war in Lebanon between 1975 and 1990. The film has an extraordinary sound design and you are not bored for a moment. It was in Berlin, it goes to Nyon and Hotdocs, well-deserved. Tell your local festival to screen it.

… in Damascus the audience enjoyed the film with big applause. What an uncle to have! Charismatic, energetic, with a smile in his eyes all the time, a happy man.

www.hotdocs.ca

Boris Mitic: Goodbye, How are You? 1

It is one of those films where you are attracted by the visual and the tone of the film and the words, in other words by the film, and still feel like you want to watch and listen again. Because you did not get it all. Being a chaptered film essay of highest originality, with funny playful captions, you can actually do your re-view by clicking your remote control. To pick the chapters. And you can visit the (also) rich website to get on your screen the aphorisms. Simply to read what you heard.

I say so because it is a difficult film for someone from outside of Serbia and ex-Yugoslavia to fully recognise and sense the constant dialogue between image and words. Much is archive from places and demonstrations, and conflict and war situations. Also from today, also from Kosovo, but also here you have to give up sometimes as you dont have the references in your visual memory. At the same time as the images and the tone and the words keep your attention the whole way through.

Nevertheless, let me skip the eternal (Nordic?) rational wish to understand everything… there is so much to discover in this ambitious journey in absurdity and subtlety where you are taken by the hand by a ”me”, the voice of an old man, who is summarising his life and talks about his friend and about the duels he would love to have. With other people and with himself. My Serbian language knowledge does not exist but the voice of the old man sets me in the mood of laughing of what is being said and what I watch. But not only laughing. There is also a sadness, a sad wisdom I would call it, from the writers and philosophers, who have inspired director Boris Mitic for making this clever satirical catalogue of image & words. It took him ”4 years of travelling 50.000 km along Balkan side roadsto make 400 shots” for a story and a visualisation to which there is but one thing to say: Good Day, I am fine. I saw your film. I feel it like I do when I have seen a play of Samuel Beckett. Provoked and entertained in a creative way. Want to see it again. Bravo!

The film is supported by arte, MDR and YLE and Serbian public sources. And you will meet it at international festivals.

Serbia, 2009, 60 mins.  

http://www.dribblingpictures.com

http://www.dokfest-muenchen.de/filme_view_web.php?fid=2844

Boris Mitic: Goodbye How are You? 2

This is a clip from a text made by the director, to be found on his website in full length:

… I myself have systematically collected aphorisms for the last ten years. Whenever I wonder why I am still living in this crazy country after years of civil wars, domestic repression and international satanization, I turn to my collection of aphorisms for reassuring consolation and a 100%-proof optimism fix.

Understanding the world around you, fighting back at the Gods with pen and paper, turning satire into a state of mind – it really means transcending it all. All of a sudden, a wasted childhood becomes an asset; terminal living in Serbia – a privilege. From this perspective, Serbia stops being a traumatized, post-war country lost in transition, and turns into a stylish crossroads full of off-beat characters trying to contribute to a better understanding of this world by making up great lines.

These authors – vagabonds, politicians, psychiatrists, dentists, postmen, winemakers… – have no illusions that they can change anything, but they also can’t bear to stay idle, so they do a brilliant service to humanity – they make their ingenious comments public. If they can’t change the world around us, at least they can change our perception of this world. More than often, this is more than enough…

http://www.dribblingpictures.com

Planete Doc Review 1

For the 6th time this international documentary film festival takes place in Warsaw at the Kinoteka. The programme is overwhelming in volume AND quality. No wonder that the festival two days ago received The Main Award at the Polish Film Institute Awards in the category International Film Event.

Take a look at the website of the festival that starts on the 8th of May and goes on until the 17th. And not only in Warsaw as the festival announces a ”Digital Weekend” of the festival (May 8-10) with proud and enthusiastic words like these:

The festival will be hitting 22 cinemas across Poland! Modern technology is opening up a panorama of possibilities. A whole new community is in the making – community in which films not only enrich our sensory perceptions, but make us feel at home in the global village and offer a glimpse into the complexity of the world around us. For the first time in Poland, and perhaps even the world, people will be able to come to a festival that is not confined to any one place, but staged right across the country. People will be able to view 10 of the films at this year’s Planete Doc Review festival in any one of 22 cinemas at the same time before casting their votes for the winner of the Arthouse Cinemas Award. All this has been made possible by the iplex.pl online cinema and the Arthouse Cinemas Network…

Photo: Rabbit a la Berlin by Bartek Konopka, 54 mins. 2009 – to be shown at the festival with a follow-up discussion on 1989.

www.docreview.pl

Planet Doc Review 2

Honour your master… this is what four young Polish filmmakers do. They have all come out of the Andrzej Wajda Master School in Warsaw, and their names are already known outside their own countries in festival circles and as participants in international training sessions like Ex Oriente.

At the festival Thierry Paladino, Piotr Stasik, Marcin Sauter and Maciej Cuske present a film on Andrzej Wajda himself, presented at the website like this:

… the truest and most intimate portrait of the Master of Polish Cinema, the winner of the Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement. It shows Andrzej Wajda’s struggle on the set of his most personal film Katyñ: a story of Polish army officers murdered by the Soviets. In 2008, Katyñ was an Oscar nominee in the Best Foreign Film category… 54 minutes is the film that I look forward to watch.

www.docreview.pl

www.docuinter.net

Planete Doc Review 3

The festival includes no less than 6 competition sections with the Millenium Award as the main one. 19 films compete for the 6000€, several of them known to readers of filmkommentaren.dk. Like ”Kites” (photo) by Polish Beata Dzianowicz, ”Burma vj” by Danish Anders Østergaard, ”Another Planet” by Ferenc Moldoványi, ”The English Surgeon” by Geoffrey Smith and ”Blind Loves” by Juraj Lehotsky. And on a note basis Slovak Peter Kerekes ”Cooking History” and Polish Marcin Latallo’s cinema version of ”Our Street” – both to be reviewed here on a later occasion.

What a relief to see this festival letting go all the special regulations and demands for exclusivity and world premieres that is otherwise to be found in the festival world. The Polish audience will profit from this golden collection of new quality documentaries. And a bit older ones as well – there is a retrospective with films of Austrian Nikolaus Geyerhalter (”Our Daily Bread”, ”Elsewhere” and ”Pripyat”).

What else – allow me to put on Danish glasses and promote the fine film of Katia Forbert and Annette Mari Olsen, ”My Iranian Paradise” which is in a special programme called ”Iran Gate”. More about this film is to be found on the website of the Danish Film Institute, see below.

www.docreview.pl

http://www.dfi.dk/tidsskriftetfilm/64/frontpage.htm  (article called ”Bridgebuilding”)

Lichtpunt

Flemish language broadcasting company Lichtpunt in Belgium introduces itself like this: ”The aim of Lichtpunt is creating informative programmes on subjects from a humanistic point of view. Above all we attempt to approach our television viewers as being open minded and outspoken adults. Special attention is given to situations where frankness and freedom is being limited. The themes treated are analysed from an ethical and not from a political point of view.”

Lichtpunt, in volume a small broadcaster, is (pre)buying a lot of documentaries as well as being involved in some coproductions. But the channel has also produced several interview programmes with European culturally important characters like Ken Loach, Günter Grass and Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Producer and commissioning editor Wim van Rompaey sent me screeners of these ”Tidjgenoten” to watch and what a pleasure in nowadays television to see programmes where the interviewer is well prepared, the interviewed responds to this with intelligence and the programme takes its time and uses good archive material or material shot for the programme. Information, entertainment, interesting talking faces, food for thought. Enzensberger (photo)… what a charming and lively man, who among many matters talks about his travelling around to look at and try to understand the world. ”Man muss es anschauen, entdecken, man interessiert sich für etwas anderes”, than yourself.

http://www.lichtpunt.be/index.php

Brügger & Bertelsen: Quatraro Mysteriet

Som stor beundrer af ”Den 11. Time” satte jeg mig for at se første afsnit af ti (på DR2) af makkerparrets nye serie om EU embedsmanden Antonio Quatraro, som i 1993 faldt eller blev skubbet ud af et vindue i en kontorbygning på rue de la Loi. Et stort filmprojekt hvor de to leder efter sandheden om den uheldige italiener og de mange spegede forbindelser, han havde.

Jeg sidder der også næste gang og håber inderligt at kvaliteten stiger klækkeligt. Stort set hele dette afsnit foregik på et hotelværelse i Casablanca, hvor de to journalister fra Danmark udspørger en engelsk journalist, som tilsyneladende ved alt om sagen. Og som Bertelsen beder om at forklare hvordan EU er opbygget. Det bliver til en kolossalt kedelig omgang interview-tv, som fotograf og instruktør Jeppe Rønde forgæves prøver at gøre spændende at se på med forskellige fotografiske indstillinger på de tre mænd i et rum. Indstillinger som bliver klippet sammen med de to ombord på en flyver på vej til Bruxelles i samtale om sagen og om flymaden. Det er et forsøg på at skabe den absurde, kloge komik, som kendetegnede ”Den 11. Time”, det fungerer bare ikke her hvor studiet er afløst af en journalistisk undersøgende og opsøgende opgave.

www.dr.dk